Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!mcnc!rti!bcw
From: bcw@rti.UUCP (Bruce Wright)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: FORTRANish C (was Re: Hungarian C Conventions)
Summary: Also a common MACRO ASSEMBLER technique
Message-ID: <2887@rti.UUCP>
Date: 13 Apr 89 15:42:33 GMT
References: <47015@linus.UUCP> <45900220@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> <2701@garth.UUCP>
Organization: Research Triangle Institute, RTP, NC
Lines: 35

In article <2701@garth.UUCP>, phipps@garth.UUCP (Clay Phipps) writes:
> In article <1415@blake.acs.washington.edu>,
> djo7613@blake.acs.washington.edu (Dick O'Connor) writes:
> >
> >The article was in the March 14, 1989 (Volume 8, Number 5) issue of
> >PC Magazine, Page 329.  Author: Charles Petzold, of course <grin>!
> 
> Good grief, folks !  I read Petzold's article last night, and 
> what he describes is just a glorification of FORTRAN naming conventions.

This sort of thing is also quite common in various assembler programming
environments.  For example, on VMS (one of several places where I do a
lot of device driver hacking), most of the system-level global names
have the general syntax:

	xxx$l_something		- for a longword (32-bit) variable
	xxx$w_something		- for a word (16-bit) variable
	xxx$b_something		- for a byte variable
	xxx$k_something		- for the size of something
	xxx$v_something		- for a bit number or general constant
	xxx$m_something		- for a bit mask

(note: xxx = the mnemonic of the facility or data structure having the 
named object or attribute, often but not always 3 characters).

There are more but this gives the flavor of the naming convention.  It
can make a big difference where you have to use assembler language and
can't remember whether some miscellaneous field is a word or a longword
(it's not always obvious from context).

But I agree that the convention makes C look more like a low-level
language.  It really only becomes necessary when you are using a language
which is so lax about typing (someone I know once said that C only has
"pretend" types :-)
						Bruce C. Wright